Boars

The forest, my grandmother said, was a sinister place where a girl my age shouldn’t go alone. We were sitting at the kitchen table as she stirred my hot chocolate. “Take the manor,” she said, whose roof we’d seen over the trees on our drive that morning. It was haunted. She dropped another sugar cube into my bowl. Years ago, Madame Léger had fallen from a balcony. Fallen? Pushed? Jumped? I listened more closely. “Her skull broke on the flagstones.” My grandmother tapped the spoon on the rim of the bowl. “They wrapped her poor head in a scarf for the viewing. She looked as if she were wearing a wimple, she who used to attend Mass in a velvet cloche hat.”

This was my first visit to my grandmother’s house, which stood not far from a one-street village. Our days were spent playing belote with a tired deck of cards and making tarts from the apricot trees in her garden—enough to entertain a girl who, as my grandmother put it, lived in her head. Mornings we went into town for the daily baguette, and Sundays we went to church. Otherwise, we kept to ourselves. My grandmother tested the temperature of the chocolate with the tip of her thumb. Her gestures were bolder than when she stayed with my family in Boston, tiptoeing around my mother and slowing her French for my father. “You live in a city,” she said, “so you can’t imagine the joy for us local girls when Madame moved into the manor. She brought her fine clothes and smart manners: flared skirts and boulevard heels. It was the twenties in Paris. Here, in the center of France, it was still 1890. Madame introduced us to style and later, to tragedy.” “Was she married?” I asked. My grandmother waved away the question. The husband had a moustache like a hairpin, some kind of industrialist. It was Madame that brought charm to the manor. “A chandelier big as your father’s car. A marble staircase rising to Saint Peter.” She lowered her voice, though the only witness to our conversation was the porcelain shepherdess on the windowsill, skirts in one hand and a crook in the other, her bonnet furred with dust. She was the only fine object in the house. “My dear,” my grandmother said. “You’re a big girl of ten, old enough to understand. Madame had lovers. They parked on the other side of the the southern review forest, and she met them by the lake. Once, your grandfather saw her in a rowboat with a man wearing yellow gloves.” We never spoke of the manor again.

Two visits later, when I’d grown breasts and knew restlessness, I left the house during my grandmother’s afternoon nap. The manor appeared at the end of a tunnel of trees, and there, strangled by ivy, was the balcony attached to Madame Léger’s room. The sun dimmed, and the moon rose. The ivy shrank back to its roots. Madame Léger threw open the French doors and stepped into the night, her shoulders pale as stone. Through the din of the party downstairs, her husband called out her name. She leaned against the balustrade to look over the trees, over my head, for a flicker of light by the lake. Nothing came. I waited, my back to the forest. No one ever lived in the manor again, my grandmother had told me, but in the years after the war, the shutters of Madame’s room opened. The smell of roses in that dead bramble of a garden. The pockmarks of a woman’s heels on the path to the lake. Did you see her ghost? I’d asked. No, she said, but others did. It gave your mother nightmares. She handed me the bowl of chocolate. Don’t remind her. You’re tougher than she was. Still, you should keep to the garden and not go into the trees. If ghosts weren’t bad enough, there were wild boars.

The last summer, I forced open a downstairs window of the...